The Obscure Early Lives of the Artists

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Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats…

– George Orwell

1.The only person I know who didn’t like To Kill a Mockingbird is a British kid I used to tutor, Alexander Brown. He spent the first 150 pages thinking Scout was a gay boy. When we got to the end, he said, “Look, Amy, I may not read a lot of endings of books, but that is a rubbish ending.” As with most things in life, Alexander Brown is a contrarian. When the book was published in 1960, it won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. It changed the national conversation on civil rights, sold thirty million copies and counting, and was ranked by Alexander’s compatriots, the assembled British librarians, as the number one book to read before you die, ahead of The Holy Bible at number two.

The film version opened fifty years ago, on Christmas Day 1962. In 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of all time. Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor playing Atticus, and the film received eight total nominations.

It is much easier to think about Scout and Dill, about Oscars and Pulitzer Prizes and millions of copies, than about the ordinary day-to-day life in which the book took form. When Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize three days after her thirty-seventh birthday, she was a college and law school drop-out who had spent years working as a reservations agent for the airlines in order to write the book. Looking back, it is possible to see how Harper Lee got from point A to point B, as if pins on a map. From the perspective of point A though — which is the point of the view of the artist him- or herself — this is a trick in perception. When you are at point A, it’s not just that you can’t see point B, it’s that it doesn’t yet exist. It’s only your process and effort that creates point B. Point B might be extraordinary, but it is created by ordinary everyday effort.

I wanted to explore this difference between being the weedy uncertainty of the writing, and the Graceland-like enshrinement of the person. I wanted to get closer to the un-Kardashian obscurity in which Lee wrote, in a cold-water flat, “hop[ing] for the best and expect[ing] nothing.” Ironically, the way to do this was the embark on a life adventure I affectionately refer to as Stalking Harper Lee.

2.
It turns out that if you want to stalk Harper Lee, you have to bring serious A game: the last person to do it rented the house next door — it was on the market. I possess far less commitment. I’ve written letters and joined the local museum. I do have idiot savant luck as a stalker: my trip coincides with the weekend of Harper Lee’s birthday. But the only real thing I have is the phone number of Dawn, a woman who had answered the phone at the museum and agreed to let me take her to breakfast.

I leave LaGuardia mid-morning on a Friday, passing a black SUV that is fully and shockingly engulfed in flames not twenty feet from the cars passing on the expressway. We are all one rubbernecking driver away from a fireball explosion ourselves. The Atlanta connection is tight enough I sprint four concourses to make my flight — a last bout of exercise that will serve me well in the coming days as I enter a near constant state of being offered baked goods. We have entered the land of Southern hospitality somewhere midair between Atlanta and Montgomery. The flight attendant tells a man reading his Kindle too late on the descent not that he’s being arrested when we land but “well, finish that one chapter. I don’t think you’re going to take the plane down.”

At the Montgomery Airport, I realize I don’t have Dawn’s number. I call the museum and a woman named Wanda answers, “First of all, which Dawn do you mean?” In a town of 6,400 people, three of the museum’s volunteers are named Dawn. Wanda says the one I am looking for runs a lemonade stand out front and goes to look for her. When she’s not there, Wanda gives me Dawn’s number out of her own cell phone.

The energy of New York is as far behind as the burning car, as different an atmosphere as oxygen and CO2, as profound a switch as give and take: the Montgomery airport has one of the only rental car exits in America that does not threaten to shred your tires. The gas station I will use to refuel on my return is not an obstacle course of three cloverleaf interchanges and two service roads away but right across the street. Drivers not only use their turn signals, they use them if the car in front of them is turning and they are not.

The interstate — I-65 South — is an almost vacant road surrounded by lush green trees that make me think of water moccasins and childhood drives to the beach.

As a native of Alabama—born in Memphis but raised in Birmingham from the age of ten — I have driven within a half an hour of where Harper Lee, the physical person, resides for a long stretch of my life. She is so close to where I have been that it is shocking that my parents — the same mother who brought Halley’s Comet sweatshirts back from a medievalist conference in Kalamazoo — would not have asked us to drive a half hour off the main road to visit the official Literary Capital of Alabama. I meander taking photos of old buildings, alternately boarded up or offering tax services, and change clothes in the parking lot of an old closed grocery story. Just the act of being in the car feels liberating.

When, an hour later, I do turn off toward Monroeville, I pass under an old plane landing in an airfield, an elegant cropduster-sized craft coming in at a North by Northwest angle. These jaunty, brightly colored, bumble-bee, World War II planes must go over Harper Lee all the time. They look like toy flyers, except for the shininess of their paint; they are what toys are based on.

I pass the Sho Nuff country cooking sign, the bungalow house that has been turned into a Pentecostal church — its cross small in proportion like a toddler teetering on a rooftop. There is a casual homemade sign that says Gates of Zion at the scale and politeness of a large suburban mailbox, not far down from a proudly manicured house with a tall and ornate fence. The gas station is a bait and tackle, there’s an old roller skating rink, and the Christian bookstore has a billboard — a small one, but a billboard nonetheless — and it looks new. This is the lifeblood moment of the adventure. Nothing has happened yet but I am enjoying myself.

Dawn is at her lemonade stand when I arrive in the town square. I will later realize that Dawn was an outsider herself, and this status makes her — through holistic and simple empathy — part of the welcoming committee or membrane of the town. Museum volunteers surround her, already staged around the courthouse to welcome visitors for that evening’s sold out show of the To Kill a Mockingbird play the town puts on each spring. Dawn, who has only just met me, makes introductions. They ask if I have heard about the “mystery guest” at lunch today. I have missed Harper Lee’s cameo by two hours. Apparently, the Alabama Writers Symposium — idiot-savant stalker luck, take two: it is the weekend of their meeting — gives an annual Harper Lee Award, this time to Fannie Flagg. Miss Lee was not expected. They tell me that someone stopped by to visit her that morning and told her they were giving the award. She replied, “That sounds nice. Can I have one too?,” and then came along.

The museum volunteers invite me to join the writers’ symposium for an outdoor dinner. The picnic buffet spreads out like a greatest hits album of Southern cooking: fried catfish, hush puppies, which are also fried, fried okra, baked beans, cole slaw, and deviled eggs. Dawn knows I don’t have a ticket for the play and comes over to say that a cast member has returned two. She completely brokers my claiming and paying for one. The ticket comes from “Doc,” the local veterinarian who plays Mr. Cunningham and whom I get to meet later as he and the other characters who form the mob stand in the off-stage area around an old dark green trash can — square and covered with lattice wood. They use it as a bar.

As it turns out, I will not meet Harper Lee, but I will get to go to the church picnic, take a nap on the sofa of the president of the Chamber of Commerce, have a farm lunch and traipse through pastures with Truman Capote’s cousin, and be a bonnet-wearing extra in the play two days later. I will meet people starting properly Aristotelian four-year interdisciplinary programs at the local junior college, programs that sound a lot less like student loan factories than formative learning experiences. I will meet the police detective who plays Boo Radley, both Atticuses, two Scouts, and Crissy, an almost-Belgian existential philosopher who married a local doctor and runs the town’s one coffee shop. Like any life adventure or creative process, this is all steeped in the texture of everyday life — from daily drives past the vast Wal-Mart they call Wally World, to the man who wants to help Dawn get ice for her lemonade stand but quips, “The worst thing about losing the city council election was giving up the key to the ice machine.”

I will come to believe that the really interesting thing about Harper Lee is, moment to moment, what happens next. Harper Lee’s own life sounds fascinating, and I start to fantasize that she is a person I would have liked to be friends with, or even who is a little bit like myself. But to make her a character instead of a person — even inside her own mythology — is not as interesting as the living breathing life-as-art practice of all the townspeople who guard her privacy fiercely, who work as the bank CEO by day and play Atticus by night, and who print me a volunteer nametag even though I can’t give directions to anything but the ladies room, and offer me Styrofoam cups of Malibu Tropical Mojito out of a giant Capri-Sun container as we chat with Miss Stephanie backstage during the play. Crissy the bookstore owner who witnessed Lee’s cameo at lunch said, “Those people have no class, snapping pictures on their cell phones. They post them to Facebook and say they had lunch with Harper Lee.” She says it kindly in playful humor.

Unlike them, I have been given a gift by the town, the gift not of witnessing but of participation. It’s probably the hardest gift you could try to give Harper Lee herself — allowing me to show up and be game. In my own life as a work of art, they are collaborators, navigators, fellow hikers in the weedy terrain of process.

3.
At the time, I was a writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. An artist in my program, Daniel Bejar had gone on his own Stalking Harper Lee trip the week before, except that instead of being in small town Alabama looking for a literary giant he was in coastal Mexico looking for Muammar Gaddafi’s son’s safe house. He passed me the adventure baton at our weekly residency meeting the Tuesday before I left.

Daniel had, a couple of years ago, learned that he shared a name with a Canadian indie-rocker, Daniel Bejar. When he realized that they also looked a lot alike, he set out to recreate some of the photos of Bejar the singer that Bejar the artist found online. He was so successful that one of the artist photos ended up in a French music article. The project, The Googlegänger, exists as the Google image search in which the two bearded, curly-haired men pop in and out of uncanny similarity, with the pervasive subtlety and play of Alfred Hitchcock designing a prank.

As if a gift from the art gods, when Daniel the artist had at last completed his final Bejarian shot in Tampa and was preparing to, at long last, cut his hair, he learned that one of Gaddafi’s sons was in political asylum in Niger. He planned to escape under an assumed name, and that name was. . . Daniel Bejar. And, if Daniel the artist shaved his head and grew his beard out, he would look a lot like Gaddafi’s son.

Something happened to Daniel on his trip that didn’t happen to me. He had the crystallizing moment of artistic conversion. He was out in a fishing boat with a man he had hired to take him around. The man asked why he was visiting and Daniel explained that, although Gaddafi’s son was still in Niger in exile, Daniel was there because of one of the safe house locations. The fisherman replied as if a genie, “Do you want to see the house? I know the woman who owns it and she owes me a favor.” Daniel got fifteen minutes to take photos of himself in a tracksuit cleaning the pool — as he imagined Gaddafi’s son on the run. His moment with the fisherman — a moment in which Daniel was expecting nothing but open to something — allowed him to pass through the portal into an uncanny and authentic experience with the house.

I had no such moment with Harper Lee, accidentally bumping into her in the cereal aisle at the Piggly Wiggly. I was stuck squarely in the present moment, in the weeds of artistic process, which is to say, life, and having a good time. My only hope-against-hope moment of goal realization was finding a Chick-fil-A sandwich late in the fourth quarter, in the Atlanta airport on the way back—in the innocent culinary past before enjoying a chicken sandwich became a morally freighted political act. That sandwich was a certain answer to a smaller question, in a past world. The whole adventure was a messy uncertain answer to a much larger and more interesting one. As Laurence the therapist would say, there is no binary of success or failure, only the framework of process. The only way to fail is not to try.

That process of obscurity and sincere attempt may never lead anywhere. As in the sciences, it is an honorable career to contribute to the body of knowledge by having your entire life’s work telescope down to the phrase, “Nope, no cures for cancer here.”

The state of being an artist — which I mean broadly to be that of people making work in any field — is that you have to trust yourself at exactly that moment of vulnerability where you truly have no idea where you are going and you don’t know if the work is good or not. You have to trust your ability to play through. You have to accept the idea that if you show up as presently as you can with as much attention to being game as you can muster, that good will come of it. Harper Lee, of course, says this best, in the character of Atticus: “[R]eal courage is . . . when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

When I left town, I was sad to leave the people. I was wearing a bracelet Dawn had given me. I would never have said this as I passed the burning car and boarded my flight down there, but, I want to go back.

Amy Whitaker
is the author of Museum Legs (Hol Art Books, 2009) and a full-time member of the Art Business faculty at the Sotheby's Institute in New York. This piece was written while in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

In Mary Gaitskill’s essay, “Leave the Woman Alone!”, one of a bracing, terrific new collection called Somebody with a Little Hammer, Gaitskill takes a look at the media reaction to some recent sex scandals involving politicians. She’s irritated that the wife of the philanderer is presumed to be humiliated; she wonders if those defending the betrayed woman are so enthusiastic because they are secretly gloating; she observes how the mistress gets something of a free pass; and she questions why the cheating men are attacked so viciously, when no one really knows their motives. Gaitskill is particularly perplexed over how, when Elizabeth Edwards continued to support her husband, John Edwards, after his affair was exposed, Edwards herself was berated, perhaps because she refused to let her marriage be defined by others, and instead defined it for herself. Watching these scandals unfold, Gaitskill, ever fascinated with public shamings, asks, “What is going on here?”
It’s a typical Gaitskill set-up. In these brilliant essays, which stretch back to the early 1990s and run up to the last few years, Gaitskill explores emotionally charged situations, catalogues conventional responses to them, then reveals their hidden, psychological underpinnings. Her explorations are incisive and unpredictable -- she sticks up for Axl Rose, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Céline Dion, and Linda Lovelace, to name a few of the unexpected; she even sticks up for the philandering politicians mentioned above. The last thing you want to do with any topic is say, “I know just what Mary Gaitskill will think of this.”
In a 2015 article, The New Yorker described Gaitskill by reputation as a “writer not only immune to sentiment but actively engaged in deep, witchy communion with the perverse.” Gaitskill’s oeuvre, from her debut 1988 short story collection, Bad Behavior, through her much-fêted, National Book Award-nominated Veronica, is known for its kinky, heartless, transgressive sexual encounters. She regularly discusses rape. As Gaitskill writes about herself, “In case you don’t know, I’m supposedly sick and dark.” It’s volatile stuff for sure, and Gaitskill’s work is a ready bullet point for anyone ready to politicize sex.
An example of the heated talk about Gaitskill came in an essay that appeared in The Rumpus in 2013. Author Suzanne Rivecca began her piece: “I hate it when men talk about Mary Gaitskill. I call for a permanent moratorium on men gassily discoursing on Mary Gaitskill.” Rivecca goes on to explain how Gaitskill is grossly misunderstood by men, in particular when it comes to feminism. “When men read Mary Gaitskill, their boners deflate. They feel squeamish and violated and desperate to reimpose a semblance of order and moral authority on their ransacked worlds.” I must say that as a man, my (literary) boner does not at all deflate when reading Gaitskill. But I should be careful here. As Rivecca says, “Even the nice things men say about Gaitskill are annoying.” The Rumpus piece was so strident that Gaitskill herself wrote a public letter to say that, while flattered by the author’s defense of her work, not all men are out to misinterpret her.
For me, the sex in Gaitskill’s work would be prurient if Gaitskill didn’t have such sensitive emotional antennae. I think a lot of the reason Gaitskill writes about sex is for the illusions, lies, power, aggression, and animal instinct it lays bare. For her, it’s a loaded nesting doll of psychological truths.
In my reading, much of what drives Gaitskill is shining a light. She is constantly lasering in on the gap between what is on the surface versus the emotional reality below. She praises the “numinous unconscious” in Charles Dickens, and his “secret life which glimmers in the margins.” She likes artists who “illuminate dark corners,” or who try to “tear things up in order to find what is real.” For Gaitskill, to contemplate darkness is a step toward health. As she writes, “The truth may hurt, but in art, anyway, it also helps, sometimes profoundly.”
In her essay “The Trouble with Following the Rules: On ‘Date Rape,’ ‘Victim Culture’ and Personal Responsibility,” Gaitskill discusses the nomenclature of inner pain, in particular people who inflate it with loaded terms, for example, calling one’s childhood a “Holocaust.”
'Holocaust' may be a grossly inappropriate exaggeration. But to speak in exaggerated metaphors about psychic injury is not so much the act of a crybaby as it is a distorted desire to make one’s experience have consequence in the eyes of others, and such desperation comes from a crushing doubt that one’s own experience counts at all or is even real.” (Italics Gaitskill’s).
Here, as elsewhere in Gaitskill, is the recognition of unspoken, deeply damaged interiors. I believe this is one of the reasons Gaitskill inspires such deep allegiance in her readers -- those who are wounded know that Gaitskill would see them as they truly are, and would not flinch.
The emotional centerpiece of this collection, "Lost Cat: A Memoir," is as fine a personal essay as you will find anywhere. It’s ostensibly about Gaitskill’s desperation over a pet cat who goes missing. Gaitskill uses the cat story as an entry point to talk about two other central sources of grief in her life: her relationship with her remote father and her experience taking into her home an inner-city boy named Caesar via The Fresh Air Fund. (This latter relationship became the source material for her recent novel The Mare.) Gaitskill ends up deeply involved with the troubled Caesar, while often failing to help him. At one point she tells Caesar she loves him because, “You are not someone who just wants to hear nice bullshit. You care. You want to know what’s real.” This, by the way, in Gaitskill-world, is as high a compliment as can be paid.
But back to the cat. Gaitskill originally found the cat in Italy, where it was homeless and blind in one eye. She describes the first encounter:
But a third kitten, smaller and bonier than the other two, tottered up to me, mewing weakly, his eyes almost glued shut...His big-nosed head was goblinish on his emaciated potbellied body, his long legs almost grotesque. His asshole seemed disproportionally big on his starved rear.
Gaitskill, needless to say, finds this cat irresistible. She later describes him affectionately as looking like “a little gangster in a zoot suit.” It’s a pattern you see again and again, Gaitskill saying to an outcast, though no one else will say so, you have worth in my eyes.In an essay about the movie version of Gaitskill’s story “The Secretary,” Gaitskill describes the story’s origin. She had read a magazine article about a girl who was videotaped being spanked by her boss while she stood in a corner and repeated, “I am stupid.” When they were discovered, the boss apologized and paid the secretary $200.
On reading it, I laughed, then shook my head in dismay, then thought, What a great story -- funny, horrible, poignant, and gross, the misery of it as deep as the eroticism; the misery, in fact, giving the eroticism its most pungent force. The wank-book aspect was clearly indispensable, but what interested me most was, Who is this girl? The Hopeful Innocent in the porn story, the cipher in the news story -- what would she be like in real life?
Another piece discusses a favorite old song of Gaitskill’s called “Nowhere Girl.” When Gaitskill first heard it in the early 1980s, the song “lightly touched me with an indefinable feeling that was intense almost because it was so light.” The song was “trying to get your attention, though unconfidently, from somewhere off in a corner. Or from nowhere.” In the book’s title essay, about teaching Anton Chekhov, Gaitskill works in a passage about telling a ragged, obscenity-hurling woman on the street, who might have robbed her, “You are so beautiful.” In all these cases, Gaitskill comes alive when turning toward what others shun.
After "Lost Cat," the other high point in the collection is Gaitskill’s essay on Linda Lovelace, “Icon.” Lovelace, for those who don’t know, experienced a meteoric ascendancy to fame following her starring role in the 1972 porn flick Deep Throat, about a woman whose clitoris is in her throat, and thus achieves orgasm by giving blow jobs. The essay discusses a smattering of documentaries and biographies about Lovelace, including an incident where she had sex with a dog.
The topic has everything Gaitskill gravitates toward: it’s provocative, it’s obscene, it’s about a woman on the fringes of acceptability, who is alternately shamed and lauded. Lovelace is also a psychological puzzle, inconsistent about whether she herself believes she is a victim. Gaitskill is in fact so taken by Lovelace, her terminology turns religious: “A compelling, even profound figure, a lost soul, and a powerful icon.” “It’s impossible to dismiss the appealing, even delightful way [Lovelace] looks in Deep Throat, or her otherworldly radiance in subsequence press conferences.”
In a superb Gaitskillian flourish, she then compares Lovelace’s ordeal to that of Joan of Arc in the famous Carl Dreyer film ThePassion of Joan of Arc. Gaitskill admits the comparison is a stretch, but still she writes, “Both women were torn apart by that which they embodied, yet for a moment glowed with enormous symbolic power.”
What greater dignity can Gaitskill confer upon Lovelace than to compare her to one of the most famous women to ever live, an icon of religious purity? To dignify something -- to say that it is worthy of our respect and attention -- is not the same as to redeem it, or forgive it, in the same way that exposing a wound is not the same as treating it. But exposing it is the physician’s first step, and Gaitskill’s. Back in 1990, she told an interviewer for BOMB magazine, “Before you can heal pain, you have to acknowledge it and feel it.”

Beneath all the well-worn fantasy tropes and flashy special effects -- the CGI dragons, the armies of evil ice zombies, the clichéd Christ allegories about magical heroes coming back from the dead -- at its heart Game of Thrones is really just a giant mashup of European history. Twenty-five million or so rabid fans are certainly looking forward to watching computer-generated dragons torch equally pixelated ice demons in the new season that starts this Sunday on HBO, but the biggest thrills in Game of Thrones arguably come from seeing real-world history recreated onscreen in the guise of a fractured fairytale. Like Homer’s mythical reimagining of the Greek past or Sir Walter Scott’s best-selling historical novels in the 19th century, HBO has come to dominate the 21st-century cultural landscape by producing the most spectacular history lesson on TV.
The historical parallels in Game of Thrones are almost too easy to pick out. (Unless you’re looking for non-Western history; then you’re mostly stuck with flat racist stereotypes. More on that in a bit.) The continent of Westeros, where the show’s main action takes place, is shaped like Britain and Ireland, and the massive ice wall that keeps out the Wildling barbarians from the North just so happens to be at the exact same spot where the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall to keep out the Celtic tribes. Similarly, the civil war at the center of Game of Thrones mimics the 15th-century War of the Roses, when the houses of York and Lancaster fought a bitter internecine battle for the English throne -- in Westeros, the Lancasters go by Lannister. The Ironborn raiders, who sail around in longships, are stand-ins for the Vikings, while the Free Cities on the continent of Essos represent the Italian city-states, right down to the island-city of Braavos, which is duly filmed in Venice. And the Valyrian Empire, which was famous for its engineering feats and military power, has crumbled into a pile of elegantly twisted ruins reminiscent of ancient Rome.
It isn’t just the real-world history behind Westeros that draws in fans, though. The made-up history within the show, much more than the dragons and ice zombies, is what drives the story forward. The plot hinges on big revelations about the personal histories of individual characters (who are Jon Snow’s parents?) and the larger political history of Westeros (who is plotting with Varys to restore the Targaryen Dynasty to the Iron Throne?). Readers of the original books by George R.R. Martin will appreciate just how critical the fictional history of Westeros is to the epic war the story depicts. Martin delights in taking long, world-building digressions to explain the minutiae of Westerosi history, from ancient patterns of human migration to the tangled lineages of important noble families, the source of all present-day conflicts. With a less agile and inventive writer, this would be a mind-numbing drag on the narrative, but in Martin’s lively prose, the history lessons can be even more entertaining than the fight scenes.
The classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohnsays that Martin writes with “Herodotean gusto”: Martin describes the wonders of the Westerosi landscape and the wars between its peoples in the same exuberant and exorbitantly detailed style as the (partly) factual travelogue, conveniently called the Histories, in which the ancient Greek Herodotus invented the genre of history-writing in the 5th century BCE. But Game of Thrones is better seen as a 21st-century echo of William Shakespeare. Martin’s plots borrow heavily from Shakespeare’s English history plays and the late-medieval time period they portray. More importantly, both Martin’s books and HBO’s TV adaptation have a distinctly Shakespearean view of how history works and why it matters.
When King Robert dies in season one, it sets off a war of succession between his friends, brothers, bastards, and opportunistic lesser lords that might as well be the War of the Roses. Shakespeare, of course, wrote eight or so plays about the War of the Roses and its backstory, starting chronologically with Richard II -- in which Henry Bolingbroke usurps the throne from Richard II and names himself King Henry IV -- and tracking the complicated fallout from Henry’s rebellion in Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2, & 3, and Richard III. (You thought Hollywood was obsessed with sequels.) Both Shakespeare and Game of Thrones use the War of the Roses to explore how rulers seize and justify their power. In Richard II, when Henry usurps the crown through raw military force, he also makes sure that Richard II legally abdicates the throne and names Henry as his heir. In Game of Thrones, Cersei tears up King Robert’s will, bribes the city guards to help make her the Queen Regent, and forces the legal regent Ned Stark to publicly confess to treason. In these fictional recreations of factual events, both Shakespeare and Game of Thrones turn English political history into a tutorial on the workings of constitutional government. It’s political science 101, with dragons.
Importantly, Shakespeare shows us the big-picture political clashes of English history from the viewpoints of individual characters -- that’s why there are so many soliloquies in his plays, times when a single character onstage shares his or her hidden thoughts with the audience. In Henry IV Part 1, for instance, Prince Hal (the future King Henry V) is a drunken lout who likes witty banter and chasing after prostitutes and has to wrestle with what he truly believes, but when it’s time to fight a war to protect his father’s kingdom, he turns out to be a highly effective soldier. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion is a drunken lout who likes witty banter and chasing after prostitutes and has to wrestle with what he truly believes, but when his father orders him to defend the kingdom, he turns out to be a highly effective . (He also channels John Falstaff, the charismatic, ingenious outsider of Henry IV Part 1: Tyrion faces social stigma as a dwarf, where Falstaff is mocked for his “fat-witted” enormity.) Game of Thrones, like Shakespeare’s play, uses an outcast with a brilliant mind, a sharp tongue, a taste for wine, and a non-normative body to explore what makes a good leader and what obligations we owe to our family and country.
Take a final example, this one directly from Martin’s books. When the rebels overthrow the Targaryen Dynasty, they kill the king’s two small children, Rhaenys and Aegon. But Aegon, it turns out, may have survived -- or at least a young man who claims to be Aegon arrives in Westeros with an army to retake his father’s throne. This mimics the bizarre real-life tale of Perkin Warbeck, a twenty-something pretender to the English crown who claimed that he was one of the two young princes famously murdered in the Tower of London by their usurping uncle Richard III. Perkin Warbeck crossed the English Channel to Kent in 1495, supported by nobles from Scotland and mainland Europe, and led a series of armed revolts before he was finally captured and hanged in 1499. Shakespeare’s contemporary John Ford wrote a play called Perkin Warbeck that tells this story in order to ask a fundamental question: what makes the king the rightful king? If you remember Varys and Tyrion’s drunken banter about what makes a good ruler on their road trip in season five (not to mention countless other characters’ disquisitions on the nature of power), you know that’s the big question at the heart of Game of Thrones too.
In his history plays, Shakespeare reimagines the English past in order to ask, again and again, what makes the king the king. Is the rightful ruler chosen by God, or determined by laws and constitutions written by human beings? Is the ruler simply the person with the most money and military power, or should the ruler be the person with the best record of actually getting things done? Game of Thrones uses European history for the same reason: to stage a debate about how leaders gain and lose the legitimate right to rule.
Martin’s books and HBO’s show give a dazzling array of different answers to that question. For Cersei, the answer is raw power -- swords create legitimacy, and she refuses even to pretend to care about her subjects. For her son Tommen, the answer is religion: the backing of the Faith conveys political legitimacy. For Stannis Baratheon, the answer is law and blood, the laws of succession that determine who should wear the crown when each king dies. For Jon Snow, the answer is that a good ruler should be elected and should have the right intentions and high moral principles. Jon’s followers, of course, end up killing him because he follows his principles. Then again, Jon also gets resurrected like Christ.
Daenerys is the most interesting case. She experiments repeatedly with how to legitimate her rule, from blood (her father was the king) to marriage (her husband was the Khal) to divine right (she appears to be the magically anointed savior of the world) to moral principles (she frees the slaves) to pragmatic success as a ruler (she spends multiple seasons bogged down in Meereen trying to improve her subjects’ lives). Her career as a queen is like a laboratory where Martin tries out the different styles of leadership represented in Roman and English history.
Daenerys’s attempts to rule also reveal the profound shortcomings of the focus on European history in Martin’s books and HBO’s TV adaptation. Daenerys swoops in like a deus ex machina on dragonback to liberate the oppressed people of color from Game of Thrones’s equivalent of the Middle East. In doing so, she (and the books and TV show) writes out the many historical non-Western models for political legitimacy (Al-Farabi, say, or Ibn Rushd; Confucius, or the Bhagavad Gita) and implies that it takes a white person to run an enlightened political system based on individual liberty. This isn’t very surprising: Art reflects the society around it, and plenty of Americans couldn’t believe a black man was the legitimate president of the United States. On the other hand, Game of Thrones goes powerfully in on the idea that a woman can be the most legitimate political leader in a crowded field. For Daenerys in this upcoming season, the woman card might turn out to be a winning hand.
Game of Thrones’ obsessive anxiety about the roots of political legitimacy helps explain why it’s such a smash hit right now. The question of what makes a ruler legitimate has been the central issue in American political life for the last fifteen years, from the mainstream to the fringe. Who won all those hanging chads in Florida in 2000? Was 9/11 an inside job? Was the Iraq War a legally and morally legitimate use of force? Was George W. Bush within his rights to have terrorism suspects indefinitely detained and tortured? Was Barack Obama really born in America, or is he a secret Muslim agent smuggled in to undermine the country? Did Donald Trump work with the Russians to steal the presidency? Can international climate accords legitimately control what America does? Does the press bravely speak truth to power, or is it all just fake news?
The world of Westeros, like the European history on which it’s based, implies that political legitimacy is both real and perceived: it rests on the power to rule, but it also lies in the eyes of the beholders, the everyday citizens who see their leaders as legitimate or not. Appearances, as Shakespeare knew, are everything -- all the world’s a stage. Or, as Shakespeare’s ruler Queen Elizabeth I put it, “we princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world.” It’s a lesson that George R.R. Martin’s characters have to learn. Robb Stark, for instance, manages for a while to maintain both the moral high ground and the military successes necessary to make himself a king. But when his underlings think he has acted illegitimately -- breaking his betrothal to the Freys and letting his mother get away with freeing Jaime Lannister -- they abandon him and kill him. In Game of Thrones, peaceful government depends on a system of political legitimacy -- an agreed-upon set of norms about who gets to rule and how -- but most of the time, that rule collapses into chaos and bloodshed.
The show ultimately reminds us that the institutions that create political legitimacy -- our laws, beliefs, customs, and constitutions, the stories we tell ourselves about why our leaders get to lead -- can be as fragile as Ned Stark’s neck, ready to explode when the next tyrant with a fop of yellow hair like Joffrey Baratheon slouches along. Behind the idealistic fantasy battle between good and evil, Westerosi history, much like our own real-world history, implies that if we want good government, we have to fight for the institutions that protect political legitimacy and preserve the rule of law. But neither our history nor Martin’s made-up one promises we’ll win.

I love the way this goes from the burning SUV to the Chick-a-Fil sandwich–the way life spreads its riches out in mysterious ways. What a lively, open-eyed look at everything that comes between point A and point B!

I went to a live performance by Louis CK recently and he was ranting about how great life really is and how wonderful it is to be in the world…”I mean, you get to drink water, breathe air…you get to eat bacon! When you eat bacon, you don’t care who the president is!…You get to read ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’!”

The Bourdieuvian posture - I've come to think of it as the
Who-Are-You-Going-to-Believe,-Me-Or-Your-Lying-Eyes? school of criticism - may be as much an infection as a diagnosis. It seems to have invaded, unexamined, online discourse about books, movies, music, and art.